Prophet's Daughter: My Life With Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside the Church Universal and Triumphant - Hardcover

Prophet, Erin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1599214253 ISBN 13: 9781599214252

Publisher: UNKNO, 2008

Synopsis

In early 1990, in response to apocalyptic prophecies given by her mother, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Erin Prophet entered a network of underground bunkers in Montana along with members of her mother's Church Universal and Triumphant, a controversial New Age sect. Emerging to find the world still intact, Erin was forced into a radical reassessment of her life and her beliefs. She had spent her adolescence watching her mother vilified as a dangerous cult leader even while attempting to meet her expectations by becoming a "prophet" herself.

 

Prophet's Daughter describes Erin's search for her mother's origins and motivations. With the craft of a storyteller, she describes the combination of health crises and external pressure that drove her mother's ever-more dire prophecies. She reveals how the allure of infallibility led her mother to a conspicuous downfall, and how her mother's rapidly progressing Alzheimer's disease truncated any hope of resolution. A remarkable memoir with implications for the dialog about power, group behavior and the future of religion.

 

About this title

About the Author

Erin Prophet coauthored the New Age favorite Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity. As the longtime spokesperson of her mother’s church, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Donahue. Today she leads a low-profile life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the Back Cover

For the first time, the truth about what went on inside a secretive sect during an event that gripped the nation?by the daughter and onetime heir apparent of its founder

?Books by former members of so-called ?destructive cults ?in particular, those by the children of their founders?tend to focus on resentments, oppressions, and family dysfunctions. The reader gets no sense of why anyone would want to follow such a leader. Erin Prophet s account is different. Having read it, I really feel that I have seen Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant as fully and realistically as possible.
?Lowell D. Streiker, author of Mind-Bending: Brainwashing, Cults, and Deprogramming in the 80s

FROM THE AUTHOR S PREFACE

My mother s apocalyptic prophecies and the shelters we built to prepare for their fulfillment inaugurated a major shift in my worldview. Since then, I have spent many sleepless nights asking myself why and how it happened and whether there was anything I could have done to change the outcome. It was a mistake, a Napoleon-invading-Russia sort of blunder, which arose from a collection of ideas that obscured and tarnished my mother s life work. . . .

From the Inside Flap

In early 1990, in response to the apocalyptic prophecies of her mother, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Erin Prophet entered a network of underground bunkers in Montana along with members of her mother s Church Universal and Triumphant, a controversial New Age sect much of America had branded a ?cult. Emerging to find the world intact, Erin was forced into a radical reassessment of everything she knew, or thought she knew, about love, life, and obligations to church and family. She had spent her adolescence watching her mother vilified as a dangerous cult leader even while attempting to meet her mother s expectations by becoming a ?prophet herself.

In Prophet s Daughter, the onetime heir apparent of the woman known to tens of thousands of followers as ?Guru Ma provides a fiercely honest account of her struggle to understand a mother who was both loved and hated. Even to her family, Elizabeth Clare Prophet projected an aura of infallibility and held her closest followers to a rigid moral code. With the craft of a storyteller, Erin shows how she first dismissed, then entertained, rumors of her mother s sexual hypocrisy, and suggests that the strain of maintaining a façade of perfection fueled her mother s departure from reality.

The taut narrative hangs on an intense combination of health crises and external pressures that drove Guru Ma s increasingly dire prophecies. Throughout the book, Erin also candidly recounts her own journey, the dwindling of her belief, and the turmoil of witnessing her beloved mother s decline. In a moving conclusion, she describes her efforts to combat the subtle corruption brought on by Guru Ma s power and increasing isolation, only to be thwarted by the onset of her mother s Alzheimer s disease.

A remarkable memoir, Prophet s Daughter affords a rare look inside the workings of a secretive sect that once held a nation s attention and still exists today. And it makes a powerful contribution to ongoing public debates about power, group behavior, and the future of religion.

Reviews

In this extraordinary memoir, Prophet pulls the curtain back on the highest levels of life inside a cult, documenting her life inside as the daughter of cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet, of the Church Universal and Triumphant, from her birth through 1990, when the Church's long-awaited apocalypse failed to materialize. Without judgment or reservation, but a remarkably clear-eyed view built on more than 10 years on the outside, Prophet's account reveals cult life through the complex relationship with her charismatic, manipulative mother-a figure of equal reverence and alarm. Prophet's straightforward voice makes the facts all the more disturbing and heartrending, but her empathy for her fellow sect-members is both touching and telling, drawing readers into the cult's midst almost against their instincts. Those expecting sordid tales and angry judgments will be surprised by the subtlety and seeming safety of the cult; at heart, Prophet's story is a classic coming-of-age tale, a young woman learning about the family business and facing the inevitable realization of her parent's fallibility, but on a truly awesome scale. Like her own experience, Prophet's intense tale is sure to stick with readers long after they make it through.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Before diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, a malady that eventually caused her consignment to full-time nursing care, Elizabeth Clare Prophet was founder (with second husband Mark Prophet), popularizer, and executive of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which promulgated a heady mixture of Christian Science, survivalism, UFOlogy, and syncretistic Christianity and is still active. Erin, Elizabeth Clare’s daughter, provides a disillusioned insider’s look at the church, which all four of Elizabeth Clare’s children have left. It can’t be easy being a mother with a supposedly direct line to the deity, but so it was in the Prophet household. Over time, Elizabeth Clare’s prophecies became more extreme—for instance, the one that spurred her to lead family and congregation literally underground in Montana in 1990, where they lived in a network of chambers to avoid the apocalypse. Emerging to find that the world had not ended, Erin began to reassess her mother’s teaching and eventually write this book. Good stuff about a powerful religious entrepreneur and her flock. --Mike Tribby

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1599214253
• ISBN 13: 9781599214252
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286